Poem fractal

Come into the garden, Maud

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

6 August 1809 to 6 October 1892 (~83)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“An Omnipotent Creator Who could make such a painful world is to me sometimes as hard to believe in as to believe in blind matter behind everything.”

Acknowledging the intellectual difficulty posed by suffering · Recorded conversation in the Memoir

More remarks (44)

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. Barry Cornwall · 0.0223 − 0.2324i · 0.007 away · Compare side by side
  2. Paul Laurence Dunbar · 0.0073 − 0.2372i · 0.009 away · Compare side by side
  3. A. A. Milne · 0.0137 − 0.2234i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
  4. Siegfried Sassoon · 0.0350 − 0.2386i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  5. Robert Mannyng of Brunne · 0.0257 − 0.2130i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
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